Parallel - Parking an Aircraft Carrier : Revising the Calculus - Based Introductory Physics Sequence at Illinois

Why Change? For many decades, calculus-based introductory physics course sequences—henceforth, “University physics”—have provided the foundation of the outstanding science and engineering programs at many of our nation’s large research universities, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). These courses, many substantially unchanged since the postSputnik science education initiatives of the late 1950s to early 1960s, have allowed most of our students to master the necessary skills to succeed in careers in science and engineering, as well as in law, medicine, and education. Consider, for instance, the national impact of our own UIUC University physics—approximately 1 in 40 practicing engineers in the United States was trained at the UIUC, 1) and most of them took these courses. Given this apparent success and the immutable nature of most of the core concepts of basic physics—Newton’s laws of mechanics, electricity and magnetism, geometrical optics—the obvious question is, “Why change?” This question becomes even more telling when the costs of changing are considered, especially for a research university. First, the sheer scale of the project is daunting—at the UIUC, we teach nearly 2000 students per semester, 70 percent of them engineering students. Second, as at other research universities, all our faculty, postdocs, and graduate assistants must maintain active, ongoing research programs, and these responsibilities must be balanced with their teaching assignments. Finally, to provide the necessary continuity for the students who take University physics each year, we must implement these changes on the fly, without the luxury of phasing them in gradually. This means that each new course must be introduced immediately after the old course ends. Overall, the process of fundamentally recreating University physics seems a very challenging (and perhaps unnecessary?) exercise—akin to “parallel-parking an aircraft carrier.” Nonetheless, despite the very real difficulties and expense inherent in undertaking major curriculum reform, we have elected to go ahead and rock the boat. (Or in our case, the aircraft carrier.) Why? First, as recent physics education research has made painfully clear, traditional physics pedagogy has often been surprisingly ineffective in conveying fundamental conceptual understanding, 2) as distinct from rote learning and formulae manipulation. While successful students are able to solve problems by the “tyranny of technique,” recent studies have shown that even they frequently misunderstand the most fundamental concepts, partly because they maintain deeply entrenched misconceptions about basic physics that conventional pedagogy has failed to dislodge. 3) Second, as also documented by physics education research, there are many individuals for whom traditional pedagogy has proven to be woefully counterproductive, leading neither to conceptual understanding nor to calculational dexterity, but rather to an utter disenchantment with physics. In an increasingly technological society, failing to “stalk the second